


blackbird, fly

by acroamatica



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gore, Horror AU, M/M, Modern AU, Not kidding, Rather A Lot Of Blood, Stalking, crows as a major character, explicit (VERY SPOILERY) content warnings in the end notes if you need them, murder and the consequences thereof, nasty people saying nasty things, pacific northwest gothic, really hope y’all like crows, seventies pop music, some typical horror tropes, spooky shit!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-30
Updated: 2016-10-30
Packaged: 2018-08-27 20:21:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8415373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acroamatica/pseuds/acroamatica
Summary: One sunny afternoon in the mountains of Washington state, Ben Organa-Solo walked out into the woods. He never came home.Six years later, a journalist specialising in missing-persons cold cases decides to follow his footsteps and see where they might lead.





	

**Author's Note:**

> written for an enormous number of the huxloween prompts, but mostly because i wanted to see if i could do it. 
> 
>  
> 
> **this is not my normal fare so please be cautious if you think you need to be. i have extremely explicit spoiler warnings in the end notes if you are worried about being triggered. none of the possibly triggering content is sexual but i am not kidding about the violence and there is some heavy psychological stuff as well. i take tagging very seriously so if you think there is something i haven't tagged that i should tag please let me know and i will add.**
> 
>  
> 
> this would not have been what it was without my cheerreaders: [crashwong](http://crashwong.tumblr.com), [favomancer](http://favomancer.tumblr.com), [zombiebrainsoup](http://zombiebrainsoup.tumblr.com), and [starsshinedarkly77](http://starsshinedarkly77.tumblr.com).  
> it certainly would never have become what it is without the incredible editing of [saltandlimes](http://saltandlimes.tumblr.com).  
> and it wouldn’t be half as _brrrrr_ without the beautiful art from [chromedqueen](http://chromedqueen.tumblr.com).  
>  mea maxima culpa for the missing poster, the website, and ruining several songs for all of you forever. 
> 
> all lyrics copyright their respective writers. sorry mr mccartney.
> 
> my youtube playlist for this fic is here: [dark black night](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrFGhOYqfUyzdbOUzOMOvDTOjM3AYuFio)
> 
> enjoy.

\---1---

The boards were quiet today. Hux had been back online for about an hour, and he still wasn’t sure what his next move would be. 

After the mess in the Keys, Phasma had told him the police were very grateful, and he was sent off to some resort for a week, all expenses paid, which he could only assume must have been on the police dime. He was damn sure the website didn’t have that kind of budget. She always paid him on time, but she usually also took a magnifying glass to his expense reports and vetoed anything she didn’t like. Margaritas would not normally have been covered, no matter how much the frosty strawberry slush had taken away his troubles.

By the time the week was up he’d almost stopped seeing the exposed shinbones of the sorority girl every time he closed his eyes; he wished that there was a shortcut to get back to remembering her as the perky brunette in her college yearbook photo and not… well. He didn’t usually find the bodies, just the people who knew where they were, but nothing about the Keys case had gone the way his cases usually did.

But now it was back to work, back on the silty office coffee and the slightly too-cold AC, back to signing off as Declan Frost instead of himself, and he had to admit he was glad. His mind didn’t like inactivity as much as his body did, and to be honest, he liked his job, most of the time. You had to, to work as a journalist.

The Rime of Frost had put up his last instalment on Friday afternoon, and he’d written a simple enough conclusion to it that morning - it didn’t fully encompass the state he’d been left in, nor the interviews he’d done with the Miami PD, but it was enough to leave his readers with closure, which was what all cold-case junkies craved, honestly; he’d spent enough time amongst them that he knew what they were all doing on these boards with him. So - on to something satisfying, this time, something with a little interest of its own - something different. No more sorority girls for a little while. 

He scrolled down, farther and farther, back past the beginning of the year into the archives. He’d found a lot of gold here, but the veins were looking a little tapped out at present. He’d looked into the Sullivan kid, that had gone nowhere; he didn’t have the resources overseas to tackle Sugihara; the McCann case was simply impossible and it didn’t matter how long he stared at it. Names, names, names, each one with a face, each face with a story behind their eyes, all of them important and all of them loved by someone.

He was back into 2014 before he saw a post he didn’t remember. It had come in the week he’d been wrapping up the casefile on the Allayne boy, which had nearly done him in, and he must have missed it in the chaos.

**Organa-Solo, Ben - 23/M - WA, USA**

It was one of Darkforces’ posts, which was already a good sign. She was one of the regulars. He vaguely remembered her name was Chelsea, and she was American, but more than that he didn’t know. It didn’t matter. She’d been on this forum longer than he had and her information was always solid, so he supposed she must be trawling police blotters or something like that.

 **darkforces** -  
_Last seen: 7/25/10_  
_Ben Organa-Solo lived alone in the small town of Pine Creek, WA. He was reported missing by his mother Leia Organa-Solo when he failed to make his bi-weekly phone call to check in with her._

_Organa-Solo was diagnosed as a teenager with several mental illnesses including schizophrenia and generalized anxiety disorder. However, he was not known to vanish for long periods of time and this was suspicious to his parents, who reported his disappearance to the Pine Creek police._

_No signs of foul play were discovered. It appears that Organa-Solo was carrying his house keys when he left his house, but he had left his wallet and cell phone in their usual location in the kitchen cupboard, where they were discovered by investigators. Due to the remote location of Pine Creek, surrounded by the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, the case was quickly abandoned as it would have been easy for Organa-Solo to meet with some misadventure in the woods._

_As no trace of Ben has ever been found, Leia Organa-Solo refused to allow the case to be closed or to declare her son legally dead. She maintains an online presence at<http://findbenjaminorganasolo.wordpress.com/> where she is still soliciting information from any members of the public._

It was an interesting enough case, on the face of it. This man had simply up and vanished, no blood, no footprints, nothing amiss. Just endless acres of trees and a total mystery.

However, nothing was ever what it looked like on the face of it, and Hux had been doing this for long enough to be able to read between the lines of the terse summary. They wouldn’t have mentioned his mental illness if it wasn’t a factor in why they didn’t look too hard. Pine Creek was a small, remote town, probably underserved and under-resourced. What was a schizophrenic kid doing up there on his own, that far away from any therapists or even GPs who might have been treating him? Was he running from something? More likely, was he running from everything?

Hux wondered darkly if whatever he was running from had found him.

He scrolled down.

Darkforces had come through with one more piece of information: what looked like an old scan of the missing poster they’d done for Ben, credited to his mother’s website.

“God,” Hux said softly, to no-one - a breath out to the universe. The image quality was awful, and frankly the photo itself wasn’t spectacular, but the face of 23-year-old Ben Organa-Solo beamed out at him from his screen, and he met the kid’s eyes for a long, long moment.

Brown, they were. Brown, and warm, and sweet. And his haircut was awful, and his ears stuck out, but his slightly uneven teeth were white and his smile… his smile.

Hux felt it like a physical blow.

This kid had deserved a better life than the one this post painted for him. And yes, he’d been deceived before: he remembered the beautiful girl in the Bradford job who had turned out to have left a trail of broken hearts and crushed self-esteem in her wake before she’d decided to cap it all off with a dramatic vanishing act. He’d enjoyed handing her over to the authorities by the end of it. But something in him, whatever was left of the idealist he’d never really been, couldn’t look at Ben Organa-Solo and suspect him of any culpability. Someone, perhaps many someones, had failed Ben - had taken a boy who smiled like he didn’t know the meaning of hurt, and had let him disappear.

Hux wasn’t an impulsive person, but he clicked reply on the post rather more quickly than usual. Darkforces’ little icon showed her as online and she had a terrific memory - it might have been two years ago, but she’d remember where she’d gotten this.

 **rime-of-frost** -  
_Thanks darkforces - can you give me sources on this?_

 **darkforces** -  
_hey frosty, nice to see you :) the number on the missing poster is still current for the pine creek station, but iirc they weren’t helpful? maybe try the website, i messaged her for permission when i put this up and she was a nice lady._

 **rime-of-frost** -  
_Good to be back, thx. Will do. Consider yourself the Queen of Scoops once again. Someday I’ll send you a medal._

\---

He’d sat in his office all afternoon, digging through news articles, beginning to get a picture of the case. There wasn’t much - a couple of stubs from the Seattle Times, an article from the Salinas Californian which informed him that the Organa-Solos weren’t even from the PNW, and an even worse black-and-white version of the photo he still had open in a window on his second screen.

The warning signs were clear enough that he’d already messaged Phasma a link to the best of the Seattle articles, and the missing poster.

 _Declan Jehosaphat Frost,_ she had written back, _tell me you’re not just taking this one because he’s cute. You KNOW this always ends badly._

From this he knew that she was teasing him outrageously, but also that neither of them had forgotten about Nathan Barnard. Nathan had consumed Hux’s waking hours for six months before Hux had finally found him - alive, one of the rare ones, and living in New Mexico under an assumed name, with a full beard and a wife and three kids. He’d pointed a shotgun at Hux. It wasn’t just for that that Hux had published the story, although without his new address or any identifying details - it was to do with the first wife and two other kids he’d also learned about during the investigation, who were mourning Nathan under the name of Simon, and the long-time lover who had known him as Ethan. It was for him that Hux had taken the liberty of punching Nathan Barnard across the face, despite the shotgun.

He’d kept up the farce that he himself hadn’t had a crush on Nathan for most of the investigation, at least until Phasma got it out of him with careful application of Bushmills and sympathy. And then he’d taken two weeks off to lick his wounds, and come back less broken-up, but also less forgiving.

He hadn’t ever made the mistake of falling for a subject again. And he certainly wasn’t doing it now. It wasn’t the lost boy on his screen that was making him feel nervous and unsettled - it was the fact that he was waiting for a call from the lost boy’s mother.

He’d given her his office number, in their brief email exchange, and she had promised that she would call when she returned from work. It was a promising start, but it was also nearly seven o’clock.

Sometime around eight the desk phone finally rang.

“Declan Frost,” he said, using the pen name as he usually did. It was often very advantageous to separate Armitage Hux and Declan Frost’s lives from each other.

“Hello. It’s Leia Organa.” Her voice was warm, and he felt immediately at ease. She wouldn’t be one of the ones who shouted, or who tried to accuse him of prying for nefarious ends.

“Mrs Organa,” he said, trying to match her tone. “Thank you for calling me.”

“Please, call me Leia,” she said, and chuckled. “I feel old enough without being ma’amed at every opportunity.”

“Leia, then,” he amended. “And you can call me Declan.”

“So you’re looking for my son, are you?” On the other end of the line, a chair creaked. “That’s a nice change.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well. Nobody else did, much. Apart from me, and his father, at the start - we knew the police weren’t likely to look too hard.”

What a statement. “Would you elaborate on that, please?” He grabbed for his mouse and woke up the computer, started typing as fast as he could. “I had gained the impression that the investigation wasn’t very thorough, but -”

Leia laughed bitterly. “That’s an understatement, Declan. We drove up to be there - the house used to be just a summer getaway, Ben’s father liked to fish and hike. I don’t think those officers did more than turn over the doormat and look in all the cupboards.”

“Interesting,” Hux said neutrally. “So - may I ask why Ben was up there by himself?”

“Well.” Leia sighed. “I wished he would have stayed with us. I did. But he never did well around large groups of people, and once he was 18 he mostly just wanted to get away. He did odd jobs, a lot of yard work and things where he didn’t have to talk to anyone and where it didn’t matter if it was one of the days where he talked to himself. He heard voices, you know. Intrusive thoughts. The doctors said it was manageable with medication, and he was good about taking it, but he did sometimes still have... off days.”

Hux looked at Ben’s picture, and couldn’t smile back at him. “Poor sod. So he moved up to Pine Creek.”

“Yes. He saved up enough to buy a car, a horrible old wreck, and he rebuilt it enough that it ran all right. And then he got jumped one night - he wasn’t small, but everyone knew he was gay, and most people - most people thought he was creepy, with all his black clothes and the way he’d look at you. And there were six of them, and they hurt him pretty bad. After that he told us he wanted to go and live where nobody would bother him. Well, we didn’t know how to say no to him.” Leia sounded as though she regretted that. “We had the house, and it wasn’t being used. He didn’t need much to live on, and we thought - at least that way we knew where he was. We knew he had a roof over his head, and a bed to sleep in. Being in California, I know well enough that it’s too easy for someone like Ben to end up with none of that. So we thought, what was the harm?”

Hux made a sympathetic noise.

“He called at least every other week, so I could make sure he was taking his pills and eating all right - he had a doctor, a therapist up in Seattle he saw every week, and…” She trailed off. “I genuinely thought he was doing better.”

“What happened?” Hux asked, as gently as he could.

“He’d been telling me he thought that some of the people in the town had it out for him. Of course he didn’t know why, he just said they thought he was crazy - ‘and they’re right, Mom,’ he goes, ‘so what am I supposed to tell them?’” She laughed sadly. “I told him to look out for himself, to be careful. To drive up to Seattle if he felt like he needed to get away. Or even to come home and see us. He just laughed and asked me why he’d want to leave his home. And that was the last time I talked to him.”

They both let Leia’s words hang between them for a while. Then she gathered herself. “I still wake up thinking he’s just gone somewhere. Maybe he had a mental break, maybe he’s forgotten who he is and he’s out in Seattle, or somewhere in Oregon, or up in Canada - but I can’t bear to think that he’s dead, Declan. I can’t.”

“What was he like?” It was a dangerous question, and he heard the soft hunger in his voice and wanted to slap himself on the hand.

“He was beautiful,” Leia said wistfully. “Just beautiful. I never knew anyone who would look at people so closely as he did - it was like he could look into your head and tell you what you were thinking. And he was big, but he wasn’t scary, not unless he was scared - he was funny, and he was sweet, and he liked old music and old cars and fixing broken things. He fed crows. You would have liked him. Everyone did if they took the time to get past what was different about him.”

“I’m sure I would have,” Hux said, even though he didn’t like people very often, especially not after so many years finding out their secrets. No doubt there were some things about Ben Organa-Solo that his mother didn’t know. But somehow he felt certain that Leia was fundamentally right: he would have liked the boy looking out of his screen.

“Are you - I looked at your website.” Leia sounded more tentative now. “You seem to do well at finding people. Do you really think you can find out what happened to Ben?”

“I don’t know,” Hux said, feeling the honesty like a weight in his chest. “But... I want to try.”

“That’s more than most,” Leia said. “Email me your office address. I’ll send you a key to the house - there’s nowhere else in Pine Creek that you can stay in, but it’s not like there’s anyone in the house now. You might as well be there. Maybe it’ll help.”

“Maybe,” Hux agreed. “Stranger things have happened.”

\---

He’d been on the highway for about an hour and a half after escaping SeaTac and the rush hour traffic snarling the roads. For the last twenty minutes there’d been nothing but trees on either side of the road, as far as he could see in every direction, including up; the Pacific Northwest didn’t hold back when it came to conifers, and most of these were probably four or five times his age. He hadn’t seen another car since he’d passed the ski resort, and his GPS was even more lost than he was.

Thankfully, Leia had thought of everything. The package she’d sent had included an annotated local road map, worn around the creases, that was currently spread out on his passenger seat.

There had also been a freshly cut key, a list of local phone numbers and businesses, and a small stack, just half a dozen 4x6 photos. Ben smiling. Ben looking at the camera, wearing a black pullover and a serious face. Out in the yard with a hulk of a car. Sprawled on the sofa, laughing with a tiny woman with her hair up who must have been Leia herself. With longer hair, blurry, looking up as though whoever had taken the picture had surprised him. And his favourite, still: the original version of the photo that they’d used for the poster.

Everyone looked artificial on posters, stripped of something vital by the depredations of several layers of jpeg compression. But here, Ben looked… he looked _alive_ , in a way the grainy poster simply couldn’t convey. His bright brown eyes crinkled at the corners, giving the uneven smile a sweetness enhanced by the points of his canines catching his lower lip; his cheeks looked too soft to have ever had to be shaved, the shadow of stubble only on his upper lip and chin; and with the ears and the wild disorder of his hair, the total effect was of almost unbearable innocence.

Hux had tucked the photos into his laptop bag, unable to leave that face exposed to the light for too long. It assailed him, this tug in his chest - this need to reach into the photo somehow, through time and space, and protect a boy who every one of Hux’s rational impulses insisted was gone. Even if Ben was alive, he wasn’t this boy anymore, and he hadn’t been for a long time. It had been six years, after all, without a single sighting of him. To have vanished so completely meant either the most drastic of sea-changes, or death. Hux knew that very well.

But nonetheless, he’d smoothed the flap of the envelope down again, and wondered if there might be something left of Ben Organa-Solo for Declan Frost to find.

If there was anything, it was here, where he turned off the highway onto a bumpy secondary road.

Pine Creek was everything Leia had warned him it would be: three or four streets of drab, weatherworn buildings that might once have been smarter, but had never been fancy. A diner, a tiny convenience store attached to a garage with two gas pumps out the front, the police station, the bar, the church, and that was it.

He followed the map to the end of Cedar Street, then turned off onto the long driveway marked out with the rusty green and yellow mailbox. 

“You can’t see the road from the house, or the house from the road,” Leia had said. “But it’s there.” And it was, all alone at the back corner of a none-too-recently mowed yard. It was grey, with peeling white trims around the edges of the porch and the windows. Two storeys, unlike most of the town’s buildings, and the second-floor windows tried valiantly to catch some sunlight, but they were dusty and the trees were taller than they’d been on the highway.

Still, it looked solid enough. Leia paid someone in town to come out every now and then and make sure the place wasn’t falling down, and although Hux didn’t think much of their standards for yard work, it didn’t look abandoned. It just looked as though nobody’d been up since last summer, or so. As though any minute, a car might come up the driveway behind him.

He parked his rental car out the front. There was a carport round the back, with a tarp-swathed shape inside that was probably Ben’s car. Someone had taken pains to make sure he could just come back to that, too.

The boards of the porch creaked as he walked up, swatting away spiderwebs and peering into the windows.

Everything inside looked… very normal, to be honest. Astonishingly ordinary, not at all like a house where anything very bad had ever happened. Dusty, but not dirty; tidied away, but not lacking in personality. _Safe,_ he thought to himself. 

He pulled the key from his pocket and tried it in the lock; it stuck, at first, but he wiggled it a bit and the rust let go, and he stepped into Ben Organa-Solo’s kitchen.

There were coffee cups in the cupboards, and bowls and plates; the pantry and fridge were bare, the fridge off at the wall. The calendar still said July 2010, but everything else just felt like a house. Empty. Clean enough. There was an old vacuum in one of the cupboards; he’d do something about the dust later.

He liked the look of the living room sofas, scuffed and broken-in leather, and the solid wooden rocking chair with the afghan folded and draped over the back. He could feel how comfortable this house had been, and still was, really - how much it was just waiting for someone to be in it to feel like a home again.

Upstairs there were three bedrooms. One had the mattress flipped up against the wall, propped on the bedframe, and all the personality of a mostly-unloved spare bedroom. He didn’t quite feel comfortable in the master bedroom, for some reason - it was objectively the most well-appointed, but it carried the sense of belonging to the people the house belonged to, like sleeping in one’s parents’ bed while they were away on holiday.

But the third small room, right by the top of the stairs, with the window that overlooked the back half of the yard and the miles and miles of trees, was different. He lingered in the doorway, looking at the calm blue walls and the twin bed snugged against the wall, under the window.

This felt right. It wasn’t too much like moving into the house this way - he was just a guest. And there was space in the dresser for his clothes, and a desk where he could keep his laptop or his suitcase.

For all that a faint unease dogged him, that sense of being watched and being about to be found in a place where he shouldn’t have been, it left him in this room. It was as though he was welcome here.

Well, it was cozy enough. He would be able to sleep here - he didn’t think he could have, in the master bedroom, not with the ghosts of Ben’s parents lingering as well as Ben himself.

He set his laptop bag down on the desk, and almost mechanically, unzipped the pocket and pulled out the envelope with the photos.

“So this is where you belong,” he said, to Ben’s smiling face.

In the diffuse sunlight, Ben’s eyes seemed to twinkle.

“But it’s not where you are,” Hux mused. “Something made you leave. Where did you go, Ben Solo?”

The photo, unsurprisingly, was mute on this issue. Hux sighed, and propped it up against the wall, on top of the bedside table.

“I’m going to find you,” he told it. “I am. That’s what I do.”

_If you’ll let me._

\---

He’d picked up some groceries in Seattle, on Leia’s advice, but the kitchen was going to need to be scrubbed down before he wanted to try cooking in it. Dinner was going to have to be whatever the little diner could scare up - nothing fancy, he imagined, but he didn’t need fancy.

Once he set foot inside, he knew he wasn’t likely to get it, either. The vinyl upholstery on the booths was faded, and so was the art on the walls, nothing new since sometime in the early Eighties. Even the waitress looked as though she’d been installed there sometime in ‘82 and just got wiped down occasionally between lunch and dinner. The smile she gave him was faded too, but good enough.

“On your way to Seattle?” she said as she poured him a cup of coffee without asking.

“Came from there,” he said. _Deb_ , he read on the badge pinned to her poly-cotton blouse.

“Well, it’s only a few hours to Spokane,” she told him, an attempt at comfort that made him laugh. “You can make it.”

“I’m not pushing through.” He scanned the menu. About what he expected. Burgers, chips, a baked pasta, homemade pie. “I’ll have the hamburger, please.”

“You’re stopping somewhere? There’s not a lot on the way…” She made a quick note on her order pad, but she wasn’t looking at it.

“Here, actually. I’m up here for two or three weeks - thought I’d get some fresh air, maybe torment the fish…”

The cover story had been Leia’s idea too, and he’d scoffed, but something about the way she was watching him made him awfully glad to have prepared it.

“So you’re staying with someone in town?”

“Just up at the old Solo place,” he said.

For four or five seconds there was absolute silence. And then the man sitting at the end of the long counter set his coffee cup down in its saucer with a startling _clink_ , and Deb said quickly, “I’ll get your order in,” and hurried back to the counter as time started up again.

Hux stared at the formica table top until she came back. Some deep and animal part of his brain was insisting that it would be a very bad idea to look too closely at the man at the counter - that he did not want that man to look back at him. He had no idea why. He didn’t know the man from Adam. But his instincts were usually good in regards to people who were likely to punch him in the nose, and so he very determinedly didn’t notice how the man wasn’t looking at him, or how he did nothing but drink very slowly from his coffee cup. There was nothing suspicious in any of that. And when Deb brought Hux his food, he ate efficiently, without looking up from his plate until he’d cleared it, and slid a twenty and a five under the edge of the plate without making any kind of fuss about it, and left.

He couldn’t put his finger on any reason why he felt better when he’d shut and locked the car doors and started the engine. But he did.

He didn’t fully relax until he was back inside the house, with the door locked behind him. There was plenty there to take his mind off any worries, at any rate. He ran the ancient vacuum over most of the surfaces, upstairs and down, shook the dust out of the afghan, and ran the kitchen sink full of hot water and soap and scrubbed the kitchen down until he felt confident he could light a burner without starting a fire. He made the small bed, with sheets from the cedar closet on the first floor - they were grey and softened with many years of wear, but they were clean and fragrant and the blue woollen blanket he’d found alongside them would be enough for warmth.

“There,” he said to Ben, whom he’d left to supervise the proceedings from atop the dresser while he moved things around. “I suppose it’s just like you left it, now.”

He collected the picture, and sat down on the edge of the bed, resting it on his knees. That tug, that _wish_ in his chest - he wanted to pet a fingertip over the smooth gloss of the photo, standing in for the cheek it depicted.

“This place would be quite cozy if you were here,” he said.

 _But I am,_ the twinkle in Ben’s eyes seemed to say.

He set Ben’s photo back on the nightstand, and yawned, suddenly and intensely. The travel and the cleaning and the heavy meal seemed to have caught up with him all at once; a moment ago he’d felt wide awake, but now he was completely ruined.

Never mind. There was no reason to stay up, not unless he wanted to. He swapped his dusty clothes for a pair of pyjamas, crawled in between the soft grey sheets, put his head on the pillow, and fell asleep the instant his breathing slowed.

\---

He came awake like being dropped, sitting bolt upright and clutching at the blanket - someone was screaming, out in the woods, they were _screaming_ , they were…

They weren’t. There wasn’t anyone, or any noise aside from the gentle hush of the wind in the trees.

He held his shaking hand up in the moonlight, to look at the dial of his watch: 3:47am. Well, he simply couldn’t be awake now. He would go back to sleep at once, it was only a dream. He’d had nightmares before, after a case wrapped up - his brain was not short on vividly horrible things to parade past his subconscious. But he didn’t usually think he was hearing things. What an _exciting_ new development.

He laid back, punched the pillow a couple of times to soften it, and looked at the photo, still looking back at him from the nightstand. Ben’s unchanging smile was deeply comforting, and he let himself reach for that comfort - the only one he had, here in this unfamiliar house.

 _If you were here, I wouldn’t have such trouble sleeping,_ he thought. The idea, fanciful though it was, was very pleasant. _I bet you’d have made me a hot drink, before bed, and then maybe - maybe you would have offered to share that big master bed, or - maybe just climbed in here with me. Or even if you didn’t - if you didn’t want that - you would still be here, and I wouldn’t be alone. I could lie here and listen to you breathing..._

A shiver broke the reverie, and he scowled at the air. He had to stop. It wasn’t right to fantasize about someone he was looking for, someone he barely knew yet - he’d give himself ideas, and they’d confuse him when he was trying to put together the real facts and lead him astray when he might have found the truth. It didn’t matter how much he liked Ben now, and it wouldn’t matter, it _couldn’t_ , until he was standing in front of Hux, by which point he would probably have learnt far too much about Ben to be able to imagine him as the sweet and innocent boy he seemed to be now.

The little bed was cold, and he tugged the blanket up under his chin.

And then he rolled over the other way, so he wasn’t looking at Ben anymore, but out the window, over the yard to the tops of the thickly shadowed trees.

\---  
\---2---

In the morning Hux unearthed a frying pan, rinsed it off and made it produce an acceptable over-easy egg, which he trapped between two slices of bread and called breakfast.

One big, glossy crow had glided down from the trees and was sitting on the porch railing, eyeing him as he worked on the sandwich.

Hadn’t Leia said something about the crows? Ben fed them. Six years on, this couldn’t be one of Ben’s crows, surely not - how long did crows live? He wasn’t sure, and the internet was too slow here to make a quick search.

He pulled the crust off the edge of his bread anyway. It was silly, but the crow seemed to expect it when he stepped out onto the porch, and tossed the crust underhand to land on the wooden boards below the railing. Close enough.

The crow tilted its head at Hux.

“Yes, it’s for you,” he said to it. “Don’t get used to it, I’m only visiting. But I won’t hurt you. Go on, it’s good.”

The crow made a small, rusty noise, hopped down off the railing and pecked quickly at the crust.

“You see?” Hux told it, feeling vindicated. “I told you.”

It cawed once, picked up the crust in its long beak, and took off, with a sudden flap that took it nearly straight up and off into the trees. 

_Well, there,_ Hux told himself, as he ate the last few bites of sandwich. _You’ve made a friend._

He hoped it might be an omen for how the rest of the day would go. He drove the car into town, thinking he’d fill it up and get a coffee, leave it outside the diner for the day and see if he could find enough else out about the town that he might get a better idea of where to start his enquiries.

The problem with small town cases, and especially ones where the subject hadn’t been well liked, was that asking the wrong person first could shut the whole case up like a clam. He knew too well already that he couldn’t start with the police, here. That was usually a bad move unless the victim was a child, or a particularly pretty woman, and it would be particularly bad given what Leia had said about how little they had seemed to care about the investigation the first time. He would speak to them, eventually - if nothing else, to see if they would let him have a look at any of the official evidence - but he’d had entire towns collectively shut their mouths before, leaving him to walk away with nothing.

Perhaps they’d all hated Ben, but he had to at least try.

He parked the car by one of the two fuel pumps, outside of the faded little service station, and put $60 worth of premium unleaded in it. That ought to do him for the next few days, maybe longer if he did more of his hunting on foot.

The man behind the counter was his own age, more or less, he thought; the shaved head made him look older, but was no doubt practical given the quantity of black grease that stained his coveralls.

He gave Hux a look just shy of mistrustful. “Can I help you?” he said grudgingly.

Hux pushed three bills across the countertop to him, over the plastic panel full of lottery tickets. “Just the fuel, thanks,” he said.

For a moment he thought the man might not take the money - he eyed it like he’d never seen it before, then looked up the length of the suitcase creases on Hux’s henley sleeve and said slowly, “You heading back to Seattle today, mister?”

“No, I’m staying in town. Just up for some fishing,” he said, and already he could tell how often he was going to have to repeat that in exactly the same pleasant tone of voice. “It’s so beautiful around these parts, seems like the perfect place to get away to.”

“You got... friends here?” The idea seemed impossible to the clerk.

“The Solos,” Hux said.

That was it: his eyes went dark and he slammed the cash drawer shut, staring Hux down.

“Leia Solo and I work together,” Hux tried. “She told me her husband always said there was nothing like the lakes up here for fishing.”

“Uh-huh.” The clerk didn’t smile.

Hux did, though, as best as he could. “Well, you have a nice day, then,” he said, because it didn’t seem likely that the clerk wanted the line, and he turned and left, keeping the smile pasted on until he was in the car and out of the clerk’s sight.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. He’d spooked the waitress, and now he’d spooked the gas station clerk, and he hadn’t even mentioned to either of them why he was really in Pine Creek. People were much too on-edge about the Solos, even now. He was going to have to work out a way to be even more careful.

Deb was on shift at the diner again, scrubbing at a mark on the countertop. He decided he was glad to see her. At least she’d been nice to him. He supposed it was most likely professional kindness, but even that could be leveraged if he played his cards right.

“Good morning,” he said, as he slipped into the booth he’d taken the first time, and added a cheerful little wave - possibly too much, but she did smile back, and came over with the coffee pot.

“You must be a mind-reader,” he told her, as she slid a mug onto the table and filled it up.

“Well, I try,” she said. “This time of the morning, it’s pretty easy.”

“You do well,” he said warmly. “But then I imagine you’ve been seeing mostly the same faces every day for most of the year.”

“We don’t get many visitors.” She shifted, set the coffee pot and tray down - pulled out her order pad. “Ever, really. Can I get you something to eat?”

He wasn’t hungry, but the opportunity to keep her talking would be worth it. “Perhaps some toast? I had a question for you in that vein, actually.”

“Oh?” She looked up from her order pad.

“Well, I rather thought this place was larger, or at least had a larger holidayer contingent, and I thought there’d be… something more in the way of guides, or brochures, or anything about good reliable places to fish.” He talked fast, watching her relax as he made himself sound more and more like a hopeless tourist. “You must talk to everyone in town - do you know if anyone here would be willing to fill me in?”

“It is pretty much just us locals here,” she said pensively. “Nobody comes, nobody leaves. But I know some of the boys do fish. I’ll see if they might be willing to share.”

“I’d appreciate that,” he said, and gave her his best smile - the one that actually almost felt real. “You’re the friendliest face I’ve seen in this town so far.”

Her cheeks went a little pink, and she nodded. “I’ll get your toast.”

He steepled his hands on the table as he waited, and plotted what his next totally innocent line of questions might be. But before she came back from the kitchen, the bell on the door dinged, and the hair stood up all along his arms.

He couldn’t be caught staring. He put his face in his coffee cup and didn’t watch as the man he’d seen here yesterday walked past, slowly and deliberately, and took his seat at the end of the counter, just where he’d sat the day before.

Deb had a coffee in front of him in moments, and a slice of pie out of the glass-front chiller. They exchanged a few words, inaudible; then she scurried away into the kitchen.

Hux nursed his coffee, and wished he’d brought his notebook or his laptop or anything, just so he had somewhere to look that wasn’t the man and his slow, methodical destruction of the slice of pie. It was cherry, too purple to be a commercial filling. It stained the plate, the fork.

Deb hastened out of the kitchen, a bread-and-butter plate in her hand - “Your toast, hon,” she said. “Sorry.”

It was cold. He unwrapped the little square of butter anyway and did his best to crush it into the crumb of the bread. Then he ate it in careful bites.

Deb was wrapping cutlery at the other end of the counter from the man, looking as though she was doing her best to ignore both of them - as though to acknowledge both of them in her restaurant at the same time was to bring the two halves of a critical mass together.

He wouldn’t set it off now. He dusted the crumbs from his fingertips, pulled out some cash and tucked it under his plate - Deb watched, and nodded tensely, and he sensed very clearly that she would be grateful if he just left.

Outside the diner it felt several degrees warmer. Not hot, really, not properly summer on the level that Florida had been, but it probably never got that warm here.

He leaned on the door of his car for a moment, turning his face up to the paler and more diffuse sun and wishing it were stronger. It didn’t seem enough to warm anyone - as though if you lived here long enough, eventually you might become so cold you could never catch back up.

He shuddered, rubbed his upper arms briefly in a movement more reflexive than actually helpful, and climbed into the car. 

\---

That night the house felt strange, chilly and on edge - or perhaps it was him who was chilly and on edge, projecting onto blameless furnishings. He started the introduction to his new article five times, and deleted every single one. He paced in circles, looked inside cupboards but didn’t touch anything, then opened up the one with the LPs in it again and pulled them out in handfuls to strew over the sofas and chairs, a riot of scuffed and sun-faded colours.

These belonged to the house; surely it had heard all of these so many times that they would be old friends. There certainly wasn’t anything newer than the very early Eighties in the lot; they would have been Ben’s parents’ records, he supposed. He would have had an MP3 player, of course. Hux wondered where that had gone and what it might have contained.

He pulled, almost at random, Private Eyes by Hall & Oates. It would do, he thought, with a sense of recklessness completely outsized to the scale of the decision, and he strode over to the turntable and tipped back its clear plastic cover.

On the turntable, kept dustless for however long it had rested there, was a copy of Carpenters’ Close to You, flipped to Side One.

Hux made a small noise of surprise.

The needle was up, and he could have swapped it out. He’d even seen the sleeve somewhere in the mess he’d made, and had just assumed the record was in it. But it felt wrong to take it out. The house had chosen this record, or someone who belonged in it had - and although he knew that it was most likely to have been Leia, reaching for a nice memory as she’d tidied the house, he couldn’t quite shake the idea that it might have been Ben’s hands that had set the disc down. That he might have stood right where Hux was standing now, and run a corduroy disc cleaner gently over the record as it spun. That he might have taken Richard Carpenter’s harmonies against Karen’s sweet voice.

He flicked the switch, and carefully dropped the needle.

As though a circuit were completed, Hux felt the chill go off the house. Maybe it was how lush and warm the arrangements were, suggesting to him that he wasn’t cold anymore and that he felt relaxed, but whatever it was, it worked. He wanted to sit down on the sofa, maybe wrap himself up in the afghan - it seemed like that was what one did, here, like that was just what was expected of him, so he cleared a space amongst the records and did it, tucking his feet up and staring at the knots in the panelling over the fireplace.

Sure, he was frustrated. Sure, he was starting to wonder if anyone in this whole town was ever going to be willing to give him the time of day, let alone actual information, or whether he was going to have to do his best to reconstruct Ben Solo’s life entirely from the meagre contents of the cupboards of his house. But right now it was okay. He’d only just begun, after all ( _thank you, Karen_ ), and no-one expected him to crack the case in two days. If it had been that easy Ben would have been found before now. No, this one would take time, and delicate, gentle effort, like prising fossils free from rock.

The sigh of the trees outside was gentle tonight. He could see how this place had been a peaceful retreat for someone who found the world too… too loud, too busy, too mean. Too much. The world didn’t quite seem to be able to creep in through doors and windows, here, the way it might have done in Seattle. It certainly couldn’t have been avoided in Hux’s tiny apartment in New York. 

Here, there were only the tree-sounds and the record to cover the noise of his own breath. 

He found it strange that he didn’t particularly want there to be anything else. Save maybe the person who was still supposed to be here, who would have removed the last traces of _out of place_ that still clung to the back of Hux’s neck and made him look out of the corners of his eyes.

 _He_ should have been here. This was still his house. It had been cleaned, sanitised - it no longer smelled like him, and it had been stripped of much of its personality, but there were so many places where darker wood suggested a knick-knack had sat there, or a scuff spoke of keys tossed onto the counter in the same spot every day, the habits of a life not yet erased by having other lives overlaid upon it.

Which of these chairs had he sat in? Which side of which sofa was his spot? There were coffee cup rings all over the battered table, but more in one corner than the rest, and Hux slid over, displacing LPs until he could run his fingertips over the marks and wiggle into the cushions of the sofa. Was it his imagination that this side felt more yielding?

He shrugged the afghan up tighter around his shoulders. 

_Why_ wasn’t he here? Then Hux could have been having a nice vacation, could have maybe actually been planning to fish, not that he ever had before but there was a first time for everything - he could have been hiking, or birdwatching and teasing the crows, or sitting on the roof outside the bedroom window and looking at the stars. He didn’t know for a fact that Ben had done that, but the window was so low and so close to the top of the bed in the little blue room that he would have wagered enormous sums on the answer being yes.

The record was getting towards the end of the first side. It was like a syrupy cocoa, comforting despite the undeniably saccharine nature of it.

_Why do birds suddenly appear_  
_Every time you are near?_

Hux thought of the crows, and chuckled. “Because you feed them,” he told the record.

_Just like me, they long to be_  
_Close to you_

Or that, he supposed. He imagined Ben, with a half-dozen crows flocking to him, perching on his outstretched arm as if he were some sort of Disney princess collecting animal sidekicks to do his bidding. Good thing he was tall; a crow took up a good deal more real estate than a bluebird.

The chuckles turned into a yawn. Half an hour of Carpenters and he was sugar-crashing. Time for bed.

He trailed the afghan all the way up the stairs and rolled himself into bed with it - after all, there was no-one to deprive of it, and he was warm and wanted to stay that way.

The moon beamed in his window and ever-smiling Ben condoned him, and he settled into the pillow.

\---

Trees. Trees and trees and trees, and uneven ground; he was running, stumbling, his legs didn’t work right and his feet were so heavy, but he was running - he fell, and caught himself, white and red at his wrists and mud, and mud, and he rolled on his shoulder and his feet came back under him and he was up and running.

Someone was sobbing, their voice high and tight in their chest, fractured like - like the bones in his wrists, like the way his ankle was grinding on itself, and his leg moved in a way it shouldn’t have and he was on the ground again.

Sobbing, and it was him, he knew that now. And it might have helped if he could stop crying long enough to figure out where he was running, but he couldn’t, couldn’t stop: someone was behind him, not far enough behind, and his foot caught a root and his other knee gave, spilled him into the mud, pine needles in his mouth mingling with the taste of blood - he couldn’t spit it all out, everything was mud, and he was up again and running again because there was no choice.

A bird shrieked and he whined back at it in answer, a noise that meant _how much farther, I can’t, I can’t, how much farther?_ , but the answer was in the pit of his chest, with the sharp edges and the mud. 

Keep going. Keep going. Never stop. They’ll catch you. 

Follow.

_I can’t._

You must.

And he wiped a hand over his face, mud and blood and tears, and the crow took off from its branch and he followed, left, right, left, right, not enough air, too much gravity -

And then there wasn’t ground where there should have been -

And Hux crashed onto the floor, elbows and knees first, tangled in the topsheet.

He clawed the fabric away from his ankles - _whole_ \- and curled around the throbbing places and clutched at his wrists - _whole, whole_ \- and for a long and terribly difficult minute, laid on the bare floorboards and tried to remember that he was Armitage Hux, a journalist, who had never had to run for his life through a terrifying forest, and who very definitely had no reason to be crying.

Fumbling at the edge of the bed, he tugged the afghan off in a heap to cover his shaking shoulders, and tried to slow his breathing and calm himself. He was fine. He was fine. It was just a dream, just an awful dream that his brain had cobbled together from crime scene photos and leftover stress, he was fine. Nobody was trying to kill him. There was nothing in this small, comfortable room to be scared of, not even so much as a monster under the bed. 

He made himself sit up and crawl back into bed, the relief of leaving the chilly floorboards immediate. But he couldn’t contemplate going back to sleep. Instead he crawled across the mattress until he could reach the laptop he’d set on the desk the night before.

He didn’t feel like writing, but Phasma had sent him an email, wanting to know how he was doing, and he drafted up a quick reply that mostly didn’t give away how shaken he still felt. She’d addressed it to “The Right Hon. D. Eleutherius Frost”, as she did, and he didn’t like to spoil her obvious good mood with whining about nothing. He wished he had any good news, though.

By the time that was done, the sky was lightening around the edges, and he could hear the crows arguing amongst themselves. It was time for a coffee, and some toast, and a new day, in which the Right Honorable Declan Eleutherius Frost had work to do.

\---  
\---3---

He was out on the porch when the crows started swearing. The largest and glossiest of the crows was perched on the arm of the bench where Hux was sitting, and it was eyeing Hux’s bread crusts in a way that made him want to smile, but the racket the rest of them were kicking up was concerning enough that he stood up and peered out down the driveway.

He’d decided not to go into town today, the way he had for the last few days. The day before, he’d swung past the diner and asked Deb about those fishing spots she’d promised to look up; she’d kept her professional smile on, but only just barely.

“Look, I have to level with you,” she’d said, leaning in so as not to have to raise her voice above a murmur. “I did ask, but. Some of the boys, well - they’re not really keen on… sharing their secrets. Not with an out-of-towner. I’m sorry.”

“I understand,” he’d said, making his voice as warm as possible to reassure her. “They wouldn’t want me going in and stealing all the best fish. Well, I’ll just have to make my own way and see what I can find.”

She’d begun to turn away, but she stopped, and looked at him very carefully. “Hon... “ He realised he hadn’t told her his name. “There’s some people in this town - well, if you’re friends with the Solos, I suppose you know. And that’s the problem, and I’m going to be frank with you because you seem like a nice guy and I don’t know if you really understand the situation.” She was twisting the edge of her apron. “People... didn’t like the Solos much. And so they don’t want much to do with you, and they like to keep what’s theirs to themselves. I’m sorry about it, I know you don’t mean any harm, but if you want to keep your nice relaxing holiday nice and relaxing, just between you and me… I’d stick close to home. I’d hate for you to find yourself at the business end of a hunting rifle because you didn’t know you were on someone’s turf.”

“Is that… likely?” He hadn’t had to fake the consternation.

“I wouldn’t rule it out,” she said. “I probably shouldn’t even have said anything, but…”

“Hang on.” He wanted to reach for her, but didn’t. “Did someone threaten you? Just because I asked you a question?”

She laughed, brief and uncomfortable. “Oh, hon, no, I’m fine. I’ve been in this town all my life, I know how it works, that’s all. I might not get too many tips for awhile if it gets back to Jake, but - someone had to warn you.”

“Jake?” he said. “Is that the man who’s in here all the time?”

“Never you mind.” She smiled, back to her work face. “Now, I’d better get your order in or you’ll starve.”

It hadn’t been a badly made patty melt, but it had tasted more or less like cardboard and he’d eaten fast enough that it had stuck in his throat. He’d known the town wasn’t happy with him being there, by now, but… this was more violent a response than he’d expected. Especially since he’d said nothing to anyone about Ben, at all - not even the suggestion that he thought there was anything to say about Ben.

He’d been halfway home, distracted and queasy, when he’d noticed the pickup truck tailing him.

He couldn’t tell who was behind the wheel. They wore a broad-brimmed hat, and the angle of the sun on the roof of the cab kept their face in shadow.

He told himself that he was being ridiculous. There had to be other reasons for someone to be going the same way he was; he was just on edge from Deb’s suggestion that the unfriendliness hid something so much more serious than small-town xenophobia.

Anyway, he was only going home, he had nothing to hide. They couldn’t disapprove of that.

As he’d turned down the driveway, he’d watched in the rear-view mirror, so that he would see the pickup go past, continue on towards its destination and leave him here, harming no-one.

It didn’t. Not until he had parked the car, and rolled down the window, unsure if it was ridiculous anymore not to want to get out; only then, he heard the crunch of wheels on the gravel shoulder, the rev of a u-turn out on the road, and then the engine faded, heading back off towards the town.

That night’s sleep had been particularly awful. The dreams had come back every night, more running on shattered bones, more heart-in-his-throat wakings, but with the added nerves of that day on top of it all, it was inevitable that they’d be worse, and they had been.

That night they’d caught him.

They’d laid into him with baseball bats, with tire irons, until things gave and snapped; they’d kicked him into the dirt, and he’d woken only when one of them had brought his boot down on the side of his head. This time the scream he’d woken to had been very real - it had been his own, still sharp in his throat.

He wasn’t proud of it, but he’d succumbed to the panic, and torn his clothes off to run his clammy, shaking hands over his skin, reassuring himself by touch as well as sight that he was hale and whole, his skin unbroken, unmarked. Then he’d crumpled onto the edge of the bed and put his head in his hands.

It was so much to try to push back down, to choke back so that he could function. He needed to sleep. He was so tired. He’d done so little good here, learned so little that he could use. This wasn’t good enough. This wasn’t how he could fulfil the promise he’d made to Leia - or the one he’d made to Ben. He’d be no good to anyone if he couldn’t sleep.

He’d forced himself to lie down again, to close his eyes and to think about anything other than the hard knot of fear in the back of his throat.

He’d been almost surprised to feel himself drift off again.

This time he was facedown in the leaves and muck of the forest floor, still and quiet. There was dirt in his mouth, like always.

There was something wrong with his face. There was something wrong with most of him.

He didn’t seem to be able to move. Or blink. He felt grateful, because he knew if he could, it would hurt, it would hurt so much, but he couldn’t move.

There was a crow on the ground, with its head tipped to the side, staring at him. A flash of recognition: this was one of his crows, one of the ones he fed, and he wanted to cry because here, at last, was something that wouldn’t harm him. The crows were his friends. His only friends.

He could hear the quiet noises of other crows in the trees, a hushed discussion.

Then, floating over them - voices.

Far away, but getting nearer, talking amongst themselves. Three of them. 

He knew them. They were the ones who had been chasing him, the ones who had shouted slurs and curses, the mouths who had spat on him as they had brought their weapons down and down and down.

“And if we dig a hole, right - like a really big one,” one of them was saying, words tumbling over each other in haste, “we grab some of this shit, dead leaves, there’s tons of it. We throw him in, put it on top, make it look like - doesn’t matter. Nobody ever fucking comes out here. They’ll never find him. Nobody’s ever gonna know.”

He wanted to run, the way he’d spent every night until now running, run and run and never be found. But his body wouldn’t move.

The crow on the ground next to him made a sort of quiet caw, the one it made when it took food from his hand.

He wished it could help. Here was his last friend, and he couldn’t even tell it to get away from the men coming, too close now, any minute they’d see him - they had to have seen him by now -

Their footsteps stopped.

“Where the fuck is he?”

“I swear this is where we - no, it has to be, look, there’s blood -”

They kicked the leaves: one of them landed on his hand.

He didn’t move. He didn’t. He couldn’t.

A shaky intake of breath. “Where the fuck - shit, _shit_ , where the fuck is he?”

“He was dead. He was dead, right? Didn’t you check?”

“I swear to God he was fucking dead.” A wet, panicky sniff. “I fucking - he was _dead_ , I swear.”

“Because we’re _all_ fucking dead if he wasn’t. If he got away - shit, he knows about - he knows _everything_ \- we’re all fucking dead -”

“No, I swear to God. I put my hand on - on his throat. He was _gone_ , man.”

They were standing right next to him.

They couldn’t see him.

“Shit. Well.” A scuffing kick; more leaves showered onto him. “He’s fucking gone now.”

“There’s… there’s bears out here, big motherfuckers, I seen one a couple years back. What if - one of them got him?”

“You fucking wish, man.”

“No, man - I bet… I bet there’s a bear out here. And if it’s big enough to take him, it’ll probably eat him, right? And.”

“And everyone’ll think he just - went out in the woods and the bear got him, and.” The third man laughed. “For such a fucking moron you’re pretty smart sometimes.”

“Well, I don’t know what the fuck else we’re gonna do.”

“Nothing, that’s what. We weren’t fucking here, we didn’t do anything in the first place - right? He’s dead, and we didn’t have one fucking thing to do with it.”

“Heh. I gotcha.”

“Shit, I guess… I guess that’s it. Nothing else we _can_ do.”

They were walking away.

And they kept walking, until he was alone in the forest again.

Only then did the crows come down from the trees, all of them, in a strange cluster around him, nattering to each other.

The ringleader, the one who’d stayed at his side the whole time, bent down and cawed softly, ran its beak up the bridge of his nose - bumped the centre of his forehead with its own.

He tried again to move, and now he could, even if his legs weren’t right, even if there was something wrong with his arms - he could stand, and he could manage something like a walk.

The crows rose up, and he followed them.

And Hux had woken up with the sun in his eyes.

After a night like that, he hadn’t felt at all capable of interacting with anyone, not even Deb; the dream had lingered, clear in his memory, and he wouldn’t have been able to pretend to be anything but shaken and exhausted and cold and terribly, terribly sad.

The crows didn’t mind, though. They never did if there was food on offer, and with the dream-crows still fresh in his mind, Hux had been lavish with bacon rinds and yolk-soaked toast scraps. Most of them had gone back to the trees after a few bites, but to his surprise the friendliest one had stayed with him, as if it knew how much he needed a pet, until he’d almost felt able to smile at it.

But now they were yelling, a cacophony of alarm, and maybe it meant a cat, or a coyote, but somehow… somehow he didn’t think it did.

He made it halfway down the long driveway before the wheels spun and he caught a glimpse of the back end of the pickup as it drove away.

After that his appetite was gone. He left the rest of his breakfast for the crows, and locked himself in to pace circles on the kitchen floor and try to think.

He wanted to email Phasma, but didn’t know what he could possibly say that wouldn’t make her question his sanity. _I’m having dreams about being murdered and someone might be stalking me, I’m scared, I give up, let me come home?_

That wasn’t how Declan Frost operated. Besides which, if he _was_ cracking up, this soon after Florida, there would be questions asked: she might have to bring in psychiatrists, or furlough him, until it could be sufficiently proven that he was healthy enough to go back to it.

No, Ben deserved better from him than that. Ben deserved better from everyone, really, but Hux of all people couldn’t fail him like that. He would just... have to do better.

Still, the pickup truck was concerning enough without the other things. He pulled up his email.

_Phas -_

_No substantive news. Townsfolk are becoming restless. I seem to be being watched. Hoping this is temporary paranoia - don’t know why, have not confided in anyone at all re true purpose of stay. If they’ve guessed they’ve done it on very little information._

_They’re trying to hide something. I’m almost certain of it. Which means that somehow I must be closer than I think._

_More news soonest possible._

_Dex_

He hit send, and waited for the confirmation before he shut his laptop - the connection wasn’t great out here, but at least he got some signal on the 4G, more than he would have expected. Things were slow, but they worked eventually.

Even that little bit of effort felt like a lot. This horrid fractured, dream-ridden sleep was doing him less good than none at all, and at just past 10am he already felt like going for a nap. He couldn’t write; he tried, but his brain skated off the tops of the words and refused to consider them.

In the end, he decided to test the old washing machine. Leia had assured him it was sound, and after a week out here, he’d either have to chance it or drive into Seattle and find a laundromat, far too long a drive on mountain highways for someone as tired as he was. So he loaded it up with clothes and soap, and with its placid chugging and sloshing as background noise, he had to admit he felt a little more settled. What could be more prosaic and less like the nightmares than the gentle swash of socks and underwear in an old top-loader?

He was glad he hadn’t left. He didn’t want to admit it, but he was starting to wonder if the only way out of this whole situation was to leave Pine Creek, which - he couldn’t, he couldn’t even think about that yet. Even had he been able to consider the pros and cons analytically, which was totally beyond him at the moment, he didn’t _want_ to think about it. It gave him a headache, and not just a metaphorical one - the vague and thumping sort right behind his eyes.

Instead, he gave himself permission to take the morning off. He was safe here, all the doors were locked and it was broad daylight. What could happen?

Amongst the records, he found the White Album, and swapped out the Carpenters for the first disc. There was nothing frightening or unexpected here; he knew these songs too well, and his overtired brain followed them without leaving room for any other thoughts. By the time side one had finished, his body felt heavy, on the edge of sleep again. He flipped the record, then fell back into the cozy leather armchair, the sunbeam through the window caressing his face, and his eyes drifted shut as the music started.

He let it happen.

He was out in the yard, and it was warm and sunny, and Ben was with him. Sweet Ben, just how he was in the picture, but better, because he was holding Hux’s hand and laughing as they walked through the soft grass towards the places where the warm ground became dappled with shadows.

In the sunlight Ben sparkled, beautiful - maybe not, exactly, not the way most people understood the term, but Hux felt himself respond to him as though he was. He’d never seen anything so precious as the way Ben smiled at him. For him. 

Ben drew him towards the trees, as quiet ripples of acoustic guitar drifted in from somewhere - _Blackbird singing in the dead of night, take these broken wings and learn to fly..._

Ben’s hand was in his, and Hux’s chest felt full of sunlight, all the cold and loneliness pushed out by the brightness of Ben’s eyes; there almost wasn’t space for air, but he didn’t need to breathe, not really. He didn’t need anything but this - anything but Ben, his not-beautiful boy, in this perfect moment here and now.

Ben put his own back up against one of the big cedars, beckoned Hux close as though he had a secret to whisper in his ear. 

Hux cradled Ben’s face between his hands, so warm, so young, with all the promise of what he would become in time showing in his bones - he wanted him, he wanted him so _badly_ -

Ben smiled gently, and tilted his chin up, and their lips met.

And Hux’s mouth filled with blood.

He jolted awake choking, gagging - the blood was real, thick and metallic on his tongue, but it was pouring from his own nose. It was everywhere, his shirtfront warm and tacky with it; he doubled over, coughing it up onto the floor in a horrible gory splatter, unable to swallow any more.

 _All your life,_ Paul McCartney sang sweetly, as Hux gasped for breath and watched his blood drip onto the wood between his feet, _you were only waiting for this moment to arise_.

There was so much of it. He couldn’t understand. 

No, he thought slowly, it was just - it was just a nosebleed, it was - it would stop -

\- no, that was too much blood -

\- _shit_ , his head was spinning, he was going to faint -

\- _do something_ -

Roughly, he pulled his shirt off, wadded it up and pressed it to his face. Maybe pressure would stanch the bleeding. 

He wasn’t sure how long it took: the sound of the record was lost in the ringing in his ears, and he kept his head between his knees until the grey cleared from his vision. 

The record hissed at the end of the grooves for quite a long time before he felt able to stand up and switch it off.

The cheerful, cozy living room now looked like a murder scene, with Hux as the pale and spattered victim, still swaying a little with shellshock, but he did his best to clean it with what few supplies he had on hand. The shirt was almost certainly a total loss; he threw it in a sinkful of water just because it was what one did, not because he really expected to ever get it clean.

But on his hands and knees, queasily going through the motions of trying to get the blood off the floor, he caught himself distracting his mind from the gruesome task by humming - _Blackbird, fly - blackbird, fly - into the light of the dark black night._

The realisation arrowed through him, sharp enough to make his breath catch and his stomach flip - _Oh, Ben,_ he thought, and slumped onto his elbows, remembering the momentary sweetness of that dream-kiss and the warmth that had filled him. _Oh, damn - damn, damn, damn._

_No, fuck’s sake, no - what am I doing?_

But he knew very well. This was no longer just about the article, anymore, if indeed it ever had been.

This empty, gnawing feeling in his chest now, where the sunshine had been - he hadn’t had that since Nathan Barnard. (He hadn’t even had that this badly with Nathan. Shit, _shit_ , it hurt to think about - it sickened him like looking at a wound.)

He couldn’t leave. Not until he knew what had happened to Ben. It didn’t matter if he couldn’t sleep; if he left, he’d never sleep soundly again.

Ben wasn’t here, and Hux _needed_ him, damn him, damn his eyes.

If he was dead - well, Hux would deal with that. It would give him closure. And if he was alive, and he was nothing like the boy Hux was dreaming about, well, at least he’d know. His heart insisted it wasn’t possible that Ben could be different, but… of course that wasn’t true, no matter how certain he felt. None of this was real, none of it, except the fact that he was lonely enough to let himself be led by even the shadow of love. It was weakness, and he hated himself for not being able to push back at it.

But this blank space, sending tendrils of creeping nothingness into his whole being, until all that was left of him was the single awful question, _why isn’t he here_ \- he couldn’t cope with it.

So there was only one thing to be done.

He had to find him. He had to.

\---  
\---4---

_Ari -_

_Are you sure you’re all right? If you have to cut your losses, do it, get out and call me from Seattle._

_Please stay safe. We need you._

_Phasma_

 

_Don’t worry about me, Phas, I’m tougher than I look._

_I need this; I have to find this kid. I’m not leaving until I do. I owe it to him._

_Ari_

 

_No, Armitage, no more Nathan Barnards, we TALKED about this. I don’t like the tone of that sentence. I know what happens when you start thinking you owe things to people; the only person you owe anything to is me, and all you owe me is an article._

_For God’s sake don’t do anything rash._

_Phasma_

 

_Phasma -_

_He’s NOT another Nathan. Trust me._

_Someone here knows what happened to him. And that’s what I’m here for. So let me do my job._

_A_

\---

That night, still too shaky to drive and too sick to eat, he sat at the big kitchen table for hours.

No-one would help him, not here. He already knew it. So he’d just have to do the best he could, go in as fully armed as he could manage and hope to surprise them enough to force their hand.

First he needed names, names and connections and the fullest picture of how the fabric of this town held itself together - the warp of business and the weft of family.

County tax records and the phone directory got him started. By midnight he had a list and a tree diagram, a few names circled; he fell into bed for a few hours; dreamed of crows, dark and welcoming, helping him up from the mud; woke hollow and sad, _alone, alone,_ but he swallowed back the word with all its sharp edges despite how it choked him, and went straight back to it.

The real crows sat on his kitchen windowsill and talked at him, wondering where their breakfast was; he still didn’t feel much like eating anything, too full of formless sorrow to leave room for food. The taste of old blood lingered in the back of his throat, though he’d brushed his teeth and rinsed his mouth out half a dozen times, and even plain buttered toast seemed both overambitious and unappealing. But he had responsibilities. He threw some bacon in a pan, and a couple of slices of bread to soak up the drippings. 

When he took it outside and set it down for them, the ringleader took a piece of bacon and gave him a shrewd look. Wondering why he wasn’t eating too, he supposed.

“It’s all yours,” he said. 

The crow dropped the bacon and cawed imperiously at him. 

He shook his head wearily. “Sorry. I’m… not really up to it.”

It turned, gave some sort of order - one of the smaller crows hastily gulped its piece of bread and took off, in a low arc that set it down on the lawn. Bugs, he supposed, to supplement the terribly unhealthy things he was feeding them.

But in a moment it was back, with a dandelion leaf in its beak. It landed at his feet and put the leaf down, then hopped back a few paces.

The intent was painfully clear. _You won’t eat that, will you eat this?_

“Oh, Christ,” he said, and sat down like a collapsing lawnchair.

After a few shaky breaths hidden in his hands, the misery ebbed a little and he looked up, damp-eyed, at the crows. 

“Why is it,” he said thickly, “that I am sitting here, in a house in the middle of nowhere, being - being _parented_ by birds? How is this my life?”

The crows seemed not to mind. That made sense, he thought - if these were Ben’s crows, this was probably not their first experience with an overemotional human.

He picked up the leaf and toyed with it for a moment, flipping it between his fingers. 

One of the crows cawed encouragingly.

“I’m actually considering it,” he told them, “because I’m clearly losing my mind.”

Reality felt as though it might become unacceptably slippery if he started doing things like eating food brought to him by crows. And yet - they were the only ones, bar a waitress who didn’t really care about him, who had done anything nice for him in days.

He was starved, for something that was not food; but it came with the food, and the dandelion leaf was crisp and green and bitter like arugula, and he felt strangely better as he bit into it.

The crows chattered amongst themselves, and rose up in a flurry of wings, leaving behind a cleaned plate, a single glossy black feather, and Hux, the strange and faulty fledgling who could not be trusted to feed himself, but who had eaten the leaf and would thus be all right for a little while.

He wished he could go with them.

\---

It took him another two days, of seemingly endless research and snatched naps when his eyes refused to focus anymore, alternating between the kitchen table and the little blue bedroom, with occasional sojourns sprawled flat on the couch when he was too tired to attempt the stairs.

Phasma had sent four increasingly agitated emails, of which he had answered one, because she was starting to get on his nerves. She was calling him Armitage, now, not Declan with a ludicrous middle name, which meant she was genuinely upset, but he’d told her again, and he meant it, and he wished she’d believe it: he was fine. 

He hadn’t had one of the really bad dreams in a while, mostly just dreams about walking through this house as it had been when he’d arrived, empty and cold and lonely. He’d finally either gotten rid of or gotten used to the old-blood taste and he could eat again, although he was running low on groceries and was really going to have to do something soon unless he wanted to start foraging for more dandelions. But the research was finally coming together. At any moment, he was sure of it, he might find the one fact that tied the whole thing together - the hook that would deliver him a gift-wrapped summary of exactly how to blackmail Pine Creek into telling him what he wanted to know.

The crows were definitely keeping an eye on him, but there hadn’t been any more leaves delivered to his feet so clearly he wasn’t that far gone.

On the strength of how much better he was feeling, he decided he might make himself presentable and go into town, get a quick bite to eat and fill up the car for a run up to Seattle. It was only an hour and a half, and as much as he didn’t want to stop working, he thought the break might do him good. He’d go up, and he’d get his groceries, and he’d come back with fresh eyes and a mind that would be ready to make the brilliant leap that would crack the case wide open. It was just ahead of him, just barely out of his reach now. One more push, once he gathered the strength, and he knew he’d have it.

He showered and shaved, humming the inescapable Carpenters tune - the birds did not suddenly appear, which he thought was rather inconsiderate of them when he was singing about them, but nonetheless the more he thought about getting out of Pine Creek for the day, the better he felt.

It might have been the voice of paranoia, but he packed up his laptop and charger and slung them into the front seat of the car before he locked up the house. He told himself that it wasn’t because he thought anyone would break in, not really, not truly - but it was better to have it with him, that way he’d be ready if inspiration struck.

He was still humming as he parked in front of the diner. The man was there, in his place at the end of the counter, but he didn’t mind. He didn’t mind anything. He felt like a different person, with an afternoon in Seattle ahead like a beacon of freedom, and he smiled at Deb and asked for a club sandwich and coffee, always coffee.

The sandwich even tasted better than usual, he thought - the bread was crisp and the flavours of the fillings were vibrant on his tongue after two days of mostly just cereal. Yes, this would be a good day, he just knew it.

He took another bite, licking stray drips of tomato off his fingers with real enjoyment, making Deb chuckle as she wiped down the table in the next booth -

“Deb,” said the man at the end of the counter. “I need a refill, are you sleeping on the job today?”

Hux shivered, _hard_ , so hard he bit the tip of his tongue and tasted blood again.

“Be there in a minute, Howie,” she called, and glanced at Hux as she trotted past - “Someone walk over your grave, hon?”

He dabbed a napkin to the tip of his tongue; it came away red. “... I wonder,” he said, and swallowed.

The man didn’t look at him, but Hux could feel his attention like a weighted collar around his neck.

He stared down at his plate. Suddenly he didn’t want to finish the food anymore. He just wanted to leave, no matter how hungry he’d been a second ago.

But it was a long drive to Seattle, and he’d need the sustenance. He was being silly. There was no reason to be so terribly unsettled by this man he’d never even spoken to, whose name he still wasn’t completely sure of. So he made himself eat the sandwich, at a reasonable pace, and wash it down with the rest of his coffee like a normal person, even though it was still hot enough to scald the bitten place on his tongue. 

He stuffed some bills under the edge of the plate, enough for a very decent tip on top of whatever the bill came to, and pretended like hell that his hands weren’t shaking as he turned his back on the man at the counter.

Nothing happened, of course; he opened up his car, and dropped the laptop bag back in the footwell. Nothing was ever _going_ to happen. He had no idea why his lizard brain was so convinced that it was. It was completely ridiculous, and he required it to stop, at once.

Telling himself that was unhelpful, though, and he pulled up at the gas station with his heart still beating far too fast.

It had to be leftover nerves that made the hair stand up along his arms when the dour garage assistant brushed his hand while counting back his change. He was rattled, he was _really_ rattled, but it still made no damn sense. He simply wasn't this easily scared. 

No, he was getting out of here, he was going to drive to Seattle and have a lovely day, and he grasped for the shreds of his good mood and held onto them as hard as he could. He was Declan fucking Frost, he had been through far worse than this, which really was nothing, and come up smiling, and he’d do it here too. 

He tucked the bills into his wallet, and turned to go, and nearly walked smack into the broad, badge-studded chest of the deputy chief of police.

“So sorry,” he said reflexively, and glanced at his face to see that he wasn’t angry, then out the door -

\- and he felt the blood drain from his cheeks.

The only other vehicle parked at the pumps was the grey pickup truck.

“You all right, mister?” the policeman drawled, from behind him, slow and amused.

For a horrible moment, he wondered if he might faint. Then he dug his fingernails into his palms, the small sharp pain bringing him back.

“Oh,” he said, out loud, and turned back to the half-dozen tiny shelves of chips and candy bars and bare essentials; he pulled a loaf of bread from the shelf, and a jar of peanut butter, which his nerveless fingers nearly dropped, and dashed back to the counter.

“Sorry, sorry, forgot - I just need some things, and -” He scrabbled at his wallet, pulled out a twenty - too much, too much, but it didn’t matter - “Keep the change,” he panted, and ran out to the car, his purchases clutched to his chest.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he chanted under his breath as he fumbled his seatbelt into the clip and nearly stalled the engine; he couldn’t breathe right, he could barely see straight, he wanted to put his head down on the steering wheel and scream and he couldn’t explain any of it beyond the wild terror that the man in the grey truck was going to catch up with him.

And he was the deputy chief of police.

He swallowed, and swallowed again, and whimpered in the back of his throat.

The car was running. Okay. All right. He could do this. He could get himself out of here - he could get himself home.

He drove carefully, and tried to breathe. He couldn’t go to Seattle, it wasn’t safe, not like this. He just. He just needed to get home.

He didn’t look at the rear-view.

He knew the grey pickup was behind him.

When he turned off, down the driveway, it went on past, and that was all that gave him the strength to get out of the car with his bread and his computer, and run, an uncontrolled prey-animal sprint to the door of the house.

It opened -

\- he was inside -

\- it locked behind him.

He slid to the floor, with a harsh, dry sobbing gasp.

Okay, he thought, and dug his fingers hard into his thigh.

Okay. 

No-one could see him here, no-one could get to him. The truck had gone, and it hadn't come back. He was fine, he was _fine_ , and any minute now he’d stop fucking shaking. He was not going to cry, and he wasn't going to be sick, and he didn't need to lie down. He was going to pull himself together, _right now_ , and then he was going to do something a reasonable adult would do, to remind himself how he worked. Declan Frost didn't fall apart like this, and Armitage Hux most certainly did not either. Not over nothing at all. He’d been stressed, he was tired, but that was no excuse to dissolve into quivering jelly.

He forced himself onto his knees, and then to his feet, clinging to the door for support. His knees wobbled, still, unacceptably so, but he made himself walk out to the living room with his laptop bag and sit down on the couch.

Ben’s parents’ record collection didn’t really run to the belligerent, but as a token gesture of defiance he put on Hall & Oates and sang along very faintly with “I Can’t Go For That”. He could not go for, or stand for, any of this. He had work to do. And if his hands shook, well, so what, nobody on the other side of the screen had to know.

He could accept the loss of the trip to Seattle. It had started to rain, thick grey clouds blotting out the sunshine and sending fat drops to patter at the windows, so it wouldn’t have been a good day to be on the highway, even without the panic attack. That was fine. He could always go up tomorrow. But if he wasn’t driving, and if he was going to give in to everything that suggested, traitorously, that he would so much rather not leave the house right now, he needed to be writing.

He cobbled together and sent off an email to Leia, full of questions about Ben’s childhood, and about the way Pine Creek had been twenty years ago. It felt disjointed and aimless, but he hoped that somewhere in it, he’d have asked something that would turn out to be useful. If nothing else, it would flesh out the first entry in the series on Ben’s disappearance, maybe give him a series title. Although, with the crows, and with the odd way the song wouldn’t leave his head after that dream, he’d already half-decided on “Blackbird”. 

He put that in his email to Phasma, not mentioning the part about the dream, or really any of what had happened that morning. It would have been frankly embarrassing to admit that he’d completely lost his nerve over such a terribly minor incident.

What was a real concern was the grey pickup truck. Why on earth would the deputy chief of police be following him?

He pulled up the Pine Creek PD website, and clicked through to the About page, wondering if there might be something in there that would explain the person he was dealing with here. He’d stayed far away from the police as yet, and they’d have no reason to be suspicious.

And there he was, smiling broadly in a way that set Hux’s back teeth on edge - Deputy Chief Jacob Hewlett, celebrating fifteen years on the force with a framed certificate. 

Jacob. _Jake_ , he thought, not Jacob, probably never Jacob. Jake Hewlett, who’d gone to high school with Dane Johnson the mechanic’s assistant and his big brother Keegan, who had almost married Deborah Ambrose - who _wouldn’t get a lot of tips if it got back to Jake_ , shit, _shit_. And it had gotten back to Jake, of course, and Dane had corroborated it, and so the chief of police knew he was friends with the Solos.

Fifteen years on the force, which meant he’d have been there when Ben had disappeared. Which meant he knew more than Hux did, and he knew he knew more than Hux did.

And if the strange twitchy out-of-towner was asking too many questions about fishing, who knew what he was up here fishing for... 

Shit, shit, _shit_ , and he’d probably blown any chance of convincing them he had nothing to hide with the ridiculous performance he’d given this afternoon in front of both Dane and Jake. He was lucky he hadn’t gotten himself arrested.

The PD was crooked too, he knew that. It had been obvious enough. Keegan Johnson had done time, possession with intent to distribute, but he wouldn’t name his boss. This was prime weed country, and meth too, and yet it had taken a Seattle PD op to catch him - even though Hux was sure it couldn’t have been hard to spot. So Jake Hewlett probably knew. But that fact hadn’t felt like it would offer him the leverage he wanted, and now he understood why. Jake knew, because everyone knew, and if everyone knew, it was no kind of secret.

No, what Jake knew, that he wanted to hide from Hux, had to be to do with the Solos.

He stared at Jake Hewlett’s smug grin and shuddered.

The wind had picked up and the yard was full of rain-drenched shadows. 

They’d caught Keegan because he’d been making too many trips to Seattle. He was unemployed. He had no reason to be commuting back and forth. And one of the nights, they’d searched his car - a shitty little modern box, no storage. It’d been obvious where he’d pried up the carpet.

Hux leaned over his keyboard in the increasing dark, lit only by the screen and concentrating too hard to bother putting on a light. With Keegan out, they would have had to find someone to move the stuff. Someone with a car - an old car, with lots of spaces for hidey holes - and maybe some obvious exploitable vulnerabilities, like a fixed income, or none at all, or maybe an isolating mental illness - and a reason to be in Seattle once a week -

\- and if he’d told them no -

Headlights raked across the front of the house, and his instincts took the lead: he jumped up, slammed his laptop shut, and dove behind the couch.

The crows were yelling, an awful racket.

Boots on the porch, and a knock on the door - “Police, open up.”

Stomping. “Jake, I don’t -”

He knew them. He knew them. They weren’t here for a social call.

Another knock, louder than the last. “Police. You in there, sir? Someone called in a concern for your welfare - I’m just here to see if you’re okay.”

Fat chance. They couldn’t see him from here, not from any angle; he was safe.

“Sir?” Jake called, and then sighed. “I don’t know,” he said, clearly to whoever he was with. “Howie said -”

“No, man,” the second voice said, and Hux recognised Dane. “Come on. He’s asleep or some shit, there’s no lights on. And it’s fucking creepy as fuck out here. Let’s come back in the morning.”

The engine started, and the headlights swung away; but Hux waited until the last crow had settled before he pressed his laptop to his chest and crawled out from behind the couch.

Still clutching the laptop, he went around and checked the doors and windows - all locked.

Then he took the biggest knife from the butcher block, and took it up to bed with him.

\---

He was out in the forest, in the dark, and someone was calling his name.

It was _his_ name, _Ari, Ari,_ on the wind, not anyone else’s; he was sure, in a way he didn’t remember always feeling sure, that he was himself.

He thought… he thought he knew the voice.

It was distorted, filtered through trees and wind, but it was almost like…

“Is that you?” he called back, and he ran, light over the carpet of needles, not sticking in the mud like he always had.

“Ari,” said the voice, suddenly much closer, and he spun around.

For a second he wasn’t sure.

The figure leaning against the tree wore a long black coat so tattered, so shredded it hung off his arms in strips, like wings. Something white winked in the moonlight from out of the tops of his battered Chuck Taylors.

There was a raw, oozing slash across his luminously pale face, and the angle of the moonlight threw stark shadows that made everything look subtly wrong, but still, it had to be his face, the beloved face - he was here, he was here, and Hux _burned_ with the need to kiss him. 

“Ben?” he said, and couldn’t help reaching out for him, though he was too far away to touch yet. “Oh, fuck, _Ben_ -”

And the figure unpeeled himself from the tree, and took a step towards Hux, and he moved - _wrong._

He smiled.

“No,” he said, and the smile was sweet, but his teeth were jagged, sharp -

\- and he held out a hand that was mostly bone - 

“Ben’s dead.”

Hux screamed himself awake before the long white hand could touch him.

He was up, bolting from the bed before he even realised he was standing, to flatten his back against the wall, where he could see the whole room and the yard out the window. He couldn’t - he couldn’t -

It was too much. He was crying, tears sliding out of control into sobbing so hard he could barely see; he couldn’t stop it no matter how much he reminded himself nothing was wrong, nothing was _wrong_ , he was safe, he was fine, he was _alone_ -

\- he was so alone -

\- he couldn’t fucking _breathe_.

He flung drawers open and dumped their contents into his suitcase, unsorted and unstacked, still crying harder than he could ever remember crying in his entire adult life. He had to _leave_ , he had to leave this place, he couldn’t take another minute of this -

\- out in the yard, something moved.

No, no, there was nothing in the yard, it was rain on the glass and shadows and his own fucking traitorous mind, there was nothing here but him and the wind, nothing - 

\- he was _actually losing his mind_ , he was _hallucinating_ , oh _Christ_ -

\- the room spun, and he staggered, stumbled, caught the edge of the mattress and fell onto it, the dizziness paralysing him. He couldn’t stand. He couldn’t _move_.

He sobbed into the soft grey sheets and clung onto the edges of the mattress as though it might buck him off.

The knife clattered to the floor, under the bed and out of reach.

\---  
\---5---

In the morning light, he felt stupid.

His eyes burned, and his face ached; crying was terrible, and he remembered now why he tried so hard never to do it. But last night it had been impossible to apply reason to anything, in the wet and terrifying dark with no-one to rescue him from it, and he’d cried himself out until he’d finally fallen asleep.

He was no longer brimming with sadness, with panic and anger and frustrated need; he’d tipped it all out of himself and let it go. He felt like a shell, a brittle, empty vessel that should have sheltered life, but now held only sand and cold seawater.

Ben was dead.

Of course Ben was dead.

Part of him had known it all along, but whether it was the force of that awful dream or merely a growing certainty that had crystallised, he felt it now in the place where his instincts settled. His beautiful not-beautiful boy, the boy he loved, was gone; he would never be anything but a dream. And to know this in the same moment as realising he loved him…

There seemed to be nothing left of Armitage Hux either.

If he couldn’t have Ben, if all he could have was the knowledge of what had happened to him and the tiniest measure of justice - well, he would have it, no matter what it cost.

It was reckless, and it was short-sighted, but he had a plan.

And so he washed himself clean, and dressed, and set out peanut-butter bread for the crows; and he drove into town with nothing more than Ben’s house key in his pocket, the same way Ben had left.

Dane was behind the counter, and at least had the grace to look surprised when Hux pushed the door open.

“What do you want?” he said.

Hux put both hands on the counter, and looked at him, long and hard.

“Dane Johnson,” he said. “Did you kill Ben Solo?”

Dane’s eyes went wide, for a moment, but he blinked it back. He looked away, and back up.

“No, sir,” he said slowly. “I didn’t have nothin’ to do with that.”

Hux _knew_ he was lying.

“Thank you,” he said.

He went to the police station next, but the desk sergeant was already waiting for him.

“You can’t see the chief,” he said.

“I’m sorry, but I think I must,” Hux said.

“Well, he’s busy, sir,” the desk sergeant said, and he had a hundred pounds and two inches on Hux, and Hux still considered, for a moment, if he could get past him.

But it didn’t matter, really.

“Will you give him a message?” Hux said. “Tell him I know about Ben Solo.”

“You need to leave, sir,” said the sergeant, coming around the corner of the desk.

“Just give him the message,” Hux said, and walked out, backwards, with his hands in the air. The sergeant let him go.

He knew what he needed to know already.

Through the plate-glass window of the diner, he could see Howie motion Deb into the kitchen as he stepped out of his car. That was kind of him, Hux thought - it would save him the trouble of offending someone who didn’t know.

In ten steps he was at the counter, sliding himself onto the seat next to the man he’d been trying so hard to avoid.

“Howard Snoke,” he said.

The man nodded, his strange deep-sunk eyes fixed on Hux.

“I know you run the operation that Keegan Johnson went down for,” Hux said, quiet and implacable. “And I know you tried to recruit Ben Solo. And I know that when he turned you down, you took him out in the woods and you killed him.”

Snoke smiled slowly. “You wanna prove any of that?”

“I will,” said Hux.

Then he slipped off the chair and walked away, spine straight and chin up as far as he could get it without looking haughty. 

Even though he’d gambled on broad daylight and security cameras keeping him alive, it was still something of a surprise when he made it back to the house without a bullet in the back of his head.

He didn’t waste the opportunity. There was only one place he felt safe now; he ran up to his room and collected his laptop bag, then slapped together two peanut butter sandwiches, wrapped them in a tea towel and tucked them in the bag too, alongside the big kitchen knife.

Then he put on his jacket, and walked out into the woods.

The crows spotted him immediately. Two of them came down from the power lines, and they hopped through the trees above his head like an escort.

“It’s all right,” he told them, feeling weirdly self-conscious at inconveniencing them. “I’m just going for a walk.”

They didn’t leave.

So he kept going, with no real trail or idea where he was headed, just going as far as he felt like going and setting occasional twig markers so he could find his way back; the crows talked now and then, but mainly they kept an eye on their strange redheaded fledgling, shared his sandwiches and scouted his path.

Out in the woods the air was fresh, and there was no sound but the branches and his two companions. It should have felt odd, isolated and wild, so different from the city life he belonged to. But it just felt like home, like a good, safe place, where no bad things could come to find him.

When the shadows began to change, he turned back towards the house.

It stood alone in the middle of the too-long grass, an old grey ship; it would have been a nice place to stay, he thought, if only the soul of it hadn’t gone.

But it wouldn’t come back now, not ever again. And Hux would be leaving soon enough.

The hours in the woods had cleared his head. He had as much of a confession as he’d ever get, and now it was time to get the hell out of Pine Creek and involve a higher authority than Declan Frost. But if he left in the daytime, when they could follow him, he wasn’t sure he’d ever make it to Seattle. The trick would be to leave quietly, under cover of darkness, just in case.

He made himself another sandwich, and ate it standing in the kitchen, too nervous to settle. Not even the Carpenters would calm him.

First of all, he thought, he’d kept Phasma in the dark long enough. 

_Phas -_

_I’m heading back to SeaTac early - very early - and I’ve got a hell of a story. But the short version…_

_The short version is that I know what happened to Ben Solo. I don’t know where they buried him, but my guess is he’s out in the woods somewhere. But if anything happens to me - I don’t think it will, but if it does - tell the police they’re looking for Dane Johnson, Jake Hewlett, and Howard Snoke. And if anything does happen to me, they’re definitely looking for those three._

_All my case notes up til now are attached for your perusal. You can see there’s enough there to at least reopen the investigation. I’ve got some drafts in my GDocs, I’ll work on them more when I have a better connection._

_I have more leads in Seattle when I get there - Ben’s mother sent me some things to think about, and there’s some people I need to look up - so I’ll probably plan for a couple of days there at least. We’ll see how it goes._

_I’ll call you in the morning._

_Dex_

It took a long time to send, long enough that he sent it again to himself on his work email, just to make sure it had gone somewhere.

He pulled his phone out, and set an alarm for 2am; packed up his suitcase, and tidied away the albums and the few dishes he hadn’t washed up yet. Except for the knife. They might leave him alone tonight, but he wanted it near him, just in case.

Once all of that was done, the plan had been to go to bed. But he found he didn’t quite feel like sleeping.

Instead, he paced, trying to wear himself out, and stood at the kitchen table, making scattered, hasty notes on his laptop as more things suggested themselves for followup from Seattle.

He’d have to send Leia an email. It wouldn’t be fair not to tell her himself. Not if he truly loved her boy - this was the least he owed her, for the sake of poor lost Ben.

But even for a professional writer, it was hard to know how to begin.

_Dear Leia,_

_I know this wasn’t the news you wanted -_ no, too flippant.

 _I am sad -_ no - _devastated -_ no - _sorry to have to tell you -_ no.

 _I am sorry to tell you -_ no.

_I am sorry. I am so, so sorry._

_I can’t do this over email. I’ll call you, and I’ll tell you everything._

_But please, know that he was a good man, and he died standing up for himself against bad people, and - I’m so sorry._

_We’ll speak soon._

_Declan_

He wasn’t happy with that, but he didn’t think he ever would be, and he hit send anyway, and stood up straight to stretch. 

He wasn’t sure what caught his attention, it wasn’t a noise, not movement - but something -

He was suddenly one hundred percent certain there was something on the porch.

Someone.

He stood, frozen, awkward, staring out the window into the dark.

There was nothing. There couldn’t be. He’d heard nothing coming, and the crows hadn’t started.

He was imagining it.

It would be simple to prove it.

He would just have to… go turn on the porch light, on the switch panel beside the door.

He could definitely do that. There was nothing outside, after all.

Yes, he could get up, and although it took an unacceptable amount of courage, he did it; his hand shook as he reached out for the switch.

Light flooded the porch, and he saw -

Nothing.

There was nothing there.

He laughed, a release of nervous tension. Of course there was nothing there. He _knew_ that.

It also took an unacceptable amount of courage to turn the lights off again.

Clearly he’d been awake too long. This wouldn’t do at all. He just needed to have a nap, a few hours, and then he’d be up and away from this place.

But he was still strangely convinced that there might be something out there. Something big.

It was probably a deer, or a bear, or just one of the crows at full wingspan.

But after all, it couldn’t hurt to just… check the door. He couldn’t remember if he’d locked it when he’d come in.

He went to the door and gave the knob an experimental jiggle. Locked, very definitely -

\- maybe not quite all the way? He twisted it, to unlock it and relock it properly -

\- it wouldn’t unlock.

It was stuck.

He jiggled it with increasing fierceness. It was solid, though, completely jammed somewhere deep in the workings of the lock, as though it had been frozen.

No, this was - this was okay. There was a screwdriver in the junk drawer in the kitchen. If he had to take the knob off the door in the morning, well and good, he would do that.

At least it had jammed shut. It was locked.

It was locked, and nothing could come in.

He could fix it in the morning. He collected his laptop and the knife off the table, and snapped the kitchen light off as he started up the stairs to bed.

He didn’t look over his shoulder, because there was nothing, there was _nothing_ on his fucking porch. He’d _looked_. It was only nerves, and he’d given in to them quite enough for one night.

He made himself lie down on the bed, even though he didn’t really expect to be able to drop off. 

But strangely, cocooned in the little blue room, under the blankets, with the knife up next to his phone on the nightstand, watched over by the picture of Ben, he did feel better. It was so comfortable here - so safe, really. So much the place where he was meant to be, right now.

\---

He was out in the sunshine with Ben, sweet, beautiful Ben with his jug ears and that perfect, innocent smile.

They were holding hands. Running: not to get away from anything, just running for the sheer joy of moving fast and feeling the wind on their faces. Laughing, because this was what children did, and they were not children, but oh, how good it was to remember it as they pelted through the grass.

Hux looked at him, and he loved him, he _loved_ him - so much that it hurt to breathe, knowing what would happen to him.

He made them stop, cupped Ben’s face in his hands: “Listen,” he said fervently. “You need to get out of here.”

“What do you mean?” Ben said, and Hux watched incomprehension mingle with the laughter in those sweet brown eyes. “This is my home. Why would I go? _Where_ would I go?”

_(Out on the road, a pickup truck with its lights off rolled to a stop at the end of the driveway.)_

_(Three men climbed out of the cab.)_

“I don’t know,” Hux said, and then in a sudden flash of inspiration: “Come with me. I’ll take you away from here.”

Ben laughed. “No, Ari, I like it here. Why don’t you stay with me? You don’t have to leave.”

_(The three men walked up the long gravel drive, jerrycans swinging from their hands.)_

_(And a shadow detached itself from the corner of the porch.)_

_(For a long moment it stood before the locked door. And then, from its pocket, it pulled a dull, rust-spotted key.)_

_(It held it out to the door as though it couldn’t quite remember what to do with it. Then it walked straight through the solid wood.)_

“You can’t stay,” Hux said, to the beautiful laughing boy, and felt his own heart ache. “They’ll kill you, don’t you understand? They’ll kill you, if you stay, and then you’ll be dead, and we can’t be together. We can’t be together.” 

He wanted to cry. He was crying.

_(The shadow climbed the stairs and stood in the doorway of the room where the redheaded man was sleeping - where another boy, once, had slept. This was right, that the man was here; he had wanted to find Ben.)_

_(It had been so long, so very long, since anyone had wanted to find Ben, to do anything other than bury him. And he had so badly wanted to be found. So, a little push, and the man had come; another, and another, and he had done what he needed to do, and the shadow had shown him, and shown him, and shown him.)_

_(The shadow watched him for a long time.)_

_(On the porch, the jerrycans sloshed, and the grass was wet with more than dew.)_

_(A match sparked, a small crump of displaced air.)_

“Don’t cry,” Ben said, and smoothed the tears off Hux’s cheeks with his big hands. “Why are you crying?”

“Because I love you,” Hux said, choking on the words. “And I don’t want you to be dead. I want you to stay with me, I need you - please, Ben -”

_(The shadow crossed the threshold, moved to the bed. It lay down next to the sleeping man and rested its head next to his.)_

_(A tear slipped from one closed eye. The shadow leaned in and brushed it away.)_

_(Smoke rose in curling wisps up the stairs.)_

“Don’t cry,” Ben said again. “I love you too, Ari. I do. We can be together. I promise.”

_(The smoke was thickening now, clouding along the ceiling, and there was light from outside the window playing over the smooth angles of the sleeping man’s face. The crows shrieked, wheeling through the air, but he did not wake.)_

_(But the shadow heard them.)_

_(It was time. He rose - slipped his arms underneath the man on the bed - lifted him easily, cradled him against his chest.)_

“Stay with me,” Hux begged Ben, clinging to his shirt, uncaring of how ridiculous he looked. “Please. Please stay with me.”

“I will,” Ben said, and kissed Hux.

It didn’t taste like blood.

It tasted like summer, and salt, and life.

_(With the man in his arms, he walked straight out through the second-story wall.)_

_(He turned, and glanced back at the bed -)_

_(- at the body there, its ginger hair still gleaming so bright in the leaping light of the flames - and the heap of mud and cloth and feathers sprawled on the mattress beside it.)_

_(Not alone anymore. Never alone again.)_

_(The crows screamed.)_

_(Ben clutched Hux tighter, took two running steps and leapt from the edge of the roof.)_

_(And he flew, he flew, into the light of the dark black night.)_

\---

_blackbird, singing in the dead of night -_  
_take these broken wings, and learn to fly -_  
_all your life_  
_you were only waiting for this moment to arise_

_you were only waiting for this moment to arise_

_you were only waiting_  
_for this moment_  
_to arise_

**Author's Note:**

> Content warnings:  
> \- Major Character Death (both major characters)  
> \- gore (aftermath of a fairly brutal murder, massive injuries described from the POV of the injured person)  
> \- explicit violence (said fairly brutal murder and references to several others)  
> \- some homophobia and ableism (Leia briefly discusses Ben getting jumped and threatened due to being gay and mentally ill)  
> \- body horror (Ben isn’t… really human anymore)  
> \- blood (Hux has a serious nosebleed)  
> \- stalking (Hux is being followed by several townspeople)  
> \- possession, mind control, dubious consent (not sexual - Ben/Kylo is controlling Hux’s mind throughout the whole story and it is occasionally clear that Hux would act differently were Ben not influencing him)


End file.
